Is it true cats always land unharmed on their feet, no matter how far they fall? –A D DOO, via America Online Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There was a Discovery Channel special on this a while back. The truth is, after a few floors it doesn’t really matter [how far the cat falls], as long as the oxygen holds out. Cats have a nonfatal terminal velocity (sounds like a contradiction in terms, but most small animals have this advantage)....

This first feature by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami launches an indispensable, if less than complete, retrospective for one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers. Made in 1974, the film tells the story of a village boy who’s determined to attend a soccer match in Tehran, a venture that involves swiping or scamming money from various sources and in effect running away from home. The comparison that many have made between this touchingly nonjudgmental and often comic short feature and The 400 Blows isn’t far off, and Kiarostami’s warm, poetic feeling for children and his flair for both storytelling and documentarylike detail are already fully in place....

It was stiff, about the size of a human forearm, wrapped in yellowing, blood-stained gauze and plastic. And it smelled of death. Holingue, who works as an illustrator for the Chicago Tribune, has been walking the area around the ten-acre pond his entire life, more than 50 years. It’s only a block from his grandparents’ house, where he was raised and still lives. He comes to the pond six times a day, walking at least one of his four dogs and observing the wildlife....

I submit Cate Plys’s review of the City Council meeting (City Council Follies, April 21) as an example of subliminal racism. It seems she wanted to poke fun at some of the aldermen and curiously, she chose members who are African-American. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Watson wished to express his opinion on the subject of the airport authority as did all the other aldermen present....

“Without knowledge of your history,” Malcolm X says in Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame, “you’re an animal.” This show sets out to teach us, and the result is big, brassy, and positive. History is seen here not in terms of wisdom but of knowledge, so the pleasure comes from quick shocks of recognition, not-in-depth exploration. This pageant-style revue with lots of loud and lovely music and expert dancing and an impassioned staged debate covers African kings and queens like Nefertiti and Hannibal, freedom fighters from Nelson Mandela to Angela Davis, thinkers from Lorraine Hansberry to Bishop Tutu, entertainers from Louis Armstrong to Bob Marley....

Friday 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not only can you see “five world premieres in two hours” at the Chicago Dramatists Workshop, but if you see ’em this weekend you can also do it for half price. The workshop’s sixth annual Playwrights for the ’90s showcase includes: Mary Had, by Roger Rueff, Strangers in the Night, by Evan Blake; Sub Rosa, by Marv Bonnett, Anchors of Love, by Mark Guarino, and Luna for Short, by Johannes Marlena....

Dale Clevenger, the first chair of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s fabled horn section, is arguably the busiest musician in town. Not only is he chiefly responsible for creating the mellow, sensuous sound that has made the orchestra a powerhouse in the late 19th-century repertoire, but his mellifluous horn playing can also be heard in a score of commercial jingles. Clevenger doesn’t solo as much as he ought to–those lucrative commercial contracts con keep a muscian very busy–but when he does it’s a special treat for horn fanciers in particular....

Don’t Start the Riot Without Me, Chicago’s Political Impromptu Theater Company, at the Greenview Arts Center. Doing political satire for 8 audience members in a theater built for 200 is difficult enough. But without keen political insight and an eye for the absurd, it’s impossible. In his Chicago debut, playwright and director R. Mark Whitehead tries to pen “a political farce much like our government” but spends too much time aiming at obvious targets: Clinton’s waffling, Stephanopoulos’s inexperience, Perot’s penchant for pie charts, Dole’s third-personitis....

With its metaphysical meandering streamlined, Keli Garrett’s adaptation of Charles Johnson’s modern fable now clocks in at a smooth two and a half hours, and paring more than an hour off its original running time has clarified its allegorical story line and made its characters more likable. Lydia Gartin’s ingenuous Faith is more assertive in deciding her own fate, while Carl Barnett’s doomed artist and Charls Sedgwick Hall’s egocentric buppie are now presented not as villainous buffoons, but as misguided pilgrims helplessly searching, like the young woman they cannot save, for the elusive good thing of the title....

Iris Adler says it takes her about four months, on and off, to build a human-looking heart or brain. She makes them out of found objects, electrical devices from mail-order catalogs, and parts from boom boxes, tape recorders, speakers, and clocks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adler isn’t a mad scientist. She’s an artist who builds hearts and brains for her kinetic sculptures, which are often adorned with religious symbols....

Helium’s new album The Dirt of Luck sounds a lot like a horror-movie sound track: gloomy keyboards, pounding funereal drums, and lyrics that mention tombs, skeletons, and black angels. But the horror in bandleader Mary Timony’s songs is real–death pervades her music. Sometimes it’s a gradual death of the spirit that comes from growing up female in a patriarchal society; other times it’s quite literal: the song “Hole in the Ground” is her quietly raging response to a friend’s murder by a jealous boyfriend....

J. Blackfoot is considered a blues celebrity on the chitlins circuit, but he has yet to cross over into the white market–probably because that market too often insists on defining singers like Blackfoot as “soul” rather than “blues” artists. Blackfoot, whose real name is John Colbert, first attained recognition as the lead male singer of the Soul Children, a lesser-known but potent aggregation that charted some important singles on Stax in the late 60s and early 70s....

MARGARET (PERCHING) Gradually, however, Margaret begins to acknowledge the desires that make her existence so galling: she fantasizes about Joy “naked in a bowl of fruit salad,” visits a women’s bar and enjoys the attention she attracts there, and masturbates while pretending that two of her female dolls are getting married. After Joy publicly declares her claim on the passive Matt–whom Margaret is all too happy to relinquish–Margaret considers suicide but instead spends the summer in northern California, where she has her first lesbian affair....

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For more than a decade violin wunderkind Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has wowed audiences with an aggressive playing style that often takes liberties with a composer’s intentions. Her nonpurist approach harks back to the age of flamboyant performers like Liszt who tended to put showmanship above all else. Onstage the Roman-born Salerno-Sonnenberg espouses a pouty punk-princess attitude that has won her a following among fellow Gen-Xers....

News From the Pits Representatives from the Nederlander Organization, which owns and operates the 2,000-seat Shubert Theatre, and the Chicago Federation of Musicians Local 10-208 met last week to begin ironing out a new contract for orchestra pit musicians to replace one expiring at the end of this month. The likely outcome? That Shubert audiences will wind up hearing smaller live orchestras for long-running touring productions, even though ticket prices only seem to be getting higher....

Almost every actor needs a day job to fall back on, a paying gig to balance the budget. It can be waiting tables, teaching, answering phones, fighting fires . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Small and wiry, the 32-year-old Van Swearingen hardly fits the Hollywood image of the heroic, hunky firefighter. “It’s what I do for a living–but I don’t think I could get cast as a fireman,” Van Swearingen says....

HI FI & THE ROADBURNERS 12/15, THURSTON’S The cumbersome, blaring attack that Hi Fi & the Roadburners call rockabilly quickly obliterates the few subtleties the genre can claim. On Fear City (Victory), they prefer to crank it up instead of paying attention to what they’re playing. ULTRAVIOLENCE 12/15, DOME ROOM Performing their new “techno-opera,” Psycho Drama (Earache), Ultraviolence threaten to transform 420 beats per minute into the most preposterous and dull thing you’ve heard....

DIE WARZAU 7/28, The problem with industrial disco, apart from the monochromatic angst-tinged gothic singing, is that it remains a perpetual slave to technology: as samplers, synthesizers, and drum machines become more and more sophisticated, old recordings sound tepid and dated. Engine (Wax Trax), the third and most recent album by Chicago’s Die Warzau, is yet another round in this cycle of built-in obsolescence. It may contain the requisite amount of fake emotion and plenty of novel sounds–jarring deconstructions and incongruous nondance music weaves–but its soul remains a machine....

A few years ago there was a lot of noise about the U.S. finally going metric. We saw road signs with mile and kilometer equivalents and soda bottles containing peculiar fractions of liters that corresponded to quarts and ounces. Then what happened? No one talks about metric anymore. How come? Is there any serious metric movement? Is not going metric part of the decline of U.S. industry in world markets? –Eric Gordon, New York...

A fascinating and highly entertaining hour-long video (1992) by Dan Bessie about a trio of puppeteers who toured America for more than seven decades with their satirical musical revues: Bessie’s 92-year-old uncle, puppeteer Harry Burnett; Burnett’s cousin Forman Brown; and Brown’s lover, Roddy Brandon. (Their LA theater–which counted Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein among its fans–was called the Turnabout because it had a puppet stage at one end, a cabaret stage at the other, and seats that swiveled....